by P. G. Nagle
“It is true. I have a letter from my publisher to that effect.”
“May I see it?”
She stared at him, angry at his disbelief, and disinclined to humor his request. “I brought it to show Congressman Cutcheon.”
“You fear my regard will damage it?”
Pressing her lips together, she withdrew the precious packet of letters she had brought with her from her pocket. These were her best hope of winning support for her claim. She leafed through them until she found Mr. Hurlbert’s letter, then handed it to Jamie and stood over him while he read it.
“W. S. Williams—is that not the company whose books you sold before the war?”
“It is.”
He quirked an eyebrow at her, then looked back at the letter. His face softened as he read, the irony leaving it, creases fading from his brow.
“Your book sold almost two hundred thousand copies?”
“Perhaps a hundred and eighty thousand.”
Jamie stood quietly for a moment, gazing at the letter, then he folded it and handed it back to her. “That is quite a testimonial.”
Emma put the letter with the others and returned all to her pocket. Jamie was regarding her thoughtfully.
“Thousands of dollars to the Sanitary Commission and other causes,” he said. “Five thousand for the sick and wounded at Harper’s Ferry. I had no idea.”
“I made no parade of it,” she said, somewhat defiantly.
Her leg was troubling her, so she returned to her seat. She avoided Jamie’s gaze, looking once more to the closed door instead.
“That was a noble deed, Emma,” Jamie said softly.
Something shivered inside her. He had not called her by her name ... in twenty years and more. He had rarely done it at all. It should not have affected her so profoundly, but she could not deny that it did.
She swallowed, suddenly weary, suddenly wishing she were elsewhere. She felt Jamie’s presence as a danger in more ways than one.
“So your efforts at Yorktown went unappreciated,” he said, reverting to their earlier subject.
His tone implied no irony; was he seeking to make amends? She did feel somewhat mollified. He believed her, or wished her to think that he did.
It was not that she wanted praise for what she had done in the service of her country. The very nature of her service had prohibited it, at the time.
She recalled how she had gone to Chaplain Brown upon her return to camp, enlisting his help to resume her normal guise. He had fetched her uniform while she scrubbed herself with soap to remove the coloring as much as possible. She had remained a nice maroon color for several days, and her skin had peeled a bit from its mistreatment, but it had all been worthwhile in her view.
“My efforts were not entirely wasted,” she said. “I saw to it that the spying peddler never plagued us again.”
“But the Confederates evacuated Yorktown after all.”
“Yes....”
Emma frowned at the memories that arose, memories of her first true moments of terror. Even now her heart raced at the thought of that time.
“And we followed.”
The War: Williamsburg, Virginia, 1862
The roads were a sea of mud and the rain fell in torrents. Thunder roared, but it was the thunder of cannon, and the flashes of fire were of musketry, not of lightning. The retreating Confederates had taken a stand in an earthworks near Williamsburg dubbed Fort Magruder after their commanding general. By the time the Second Michigan brought up the rear of the pursuit, the battle was fully involved.
The sounds reverberated through the woods and over the plain. Emma flinched despite herself when a minie ball whined past her head.
She rode her faithful Samuel, trailing in the wake of Colonel Poe and his staff. As one of the few in the regiment who were mounted, she felt she made rather too large a target, and was glad when Colonel Poe chose a position at the rear of an open field and pitched his colors. The regiment arrayed itself on the field, arms in hand, staring nervously at the chaos before them, into which they would soon plunge.
“Report to your company, Thompson,” the colonel shouted over the din.
Emma nodded, dismounted, and left her horse on a hastily-established picket line at the edge of the field with those belonging to some of the other officers. Taking her musket in hand, she hastened along the line to her company. Damon greeted her with a flashing smile as she took her place beside him. So many times they had stood so, drilling in the camp. It was familiar and at the same time, vastly different.
The taste of gunpowder was on the air, even through the rain. Flashes of light from cannon or musket fire revealed timber felled in all directions, making cover for hundreds of Rebels who poured a deadly fire into the advancing Federal troops.
The Second joined the advance, slogging through mud and mire. In the face of a continuous hail of bullets from hundreds of rifle pits, the Federals grimly moved forward.
Emma heard a voice calling above the din, “Thompson! Frank Thompson!”
Following the sound, she saw Colonel Poe standing on a slight rise ahead of the regiment, beckoning to her. She left the ranks and ran to join him.
“Get your horse and carry this to General Kearny,” the Colonel said breathlessly, holding out a scrap of paper torn from a pocket notebook. “Hurry!”
“Yes, sir!”
Emma stuffed the note into her breast pocket and scrambled back over the broken ground toward the woods. No longer surrounded by her fellows, she was suddenly more aware of the bullets flying all around her. She dared not look back, but ran with her heart pounding and her lungs aching, hoping her mount would still be where she had left it.
She passed a soldier lying face down in the mud. Unable to leave him so, she pulled him onto his side, and saw that half his head had been blown away. With a small, mournful cry she left him and hastened on.
Samuel was where she had left him, all his limbs tensed nervously at the sound of battle. He shied from her when she first came near, but she spoke to him and petted him to soothe him. She secured her musket to the saddle and mounted, then rode to the edge of the woods.
The field over which the Second had passed looked less harrowing from here, though she could see two other men who had fallen, apart from the one she had touched. She watched the dark line of the Second slowly continuing toward the enemy, only separated from her by a field yet in a sense far distant.
Turning her horse, she sought the road and pressed forward. Her regiment had been the last to come this way, but couriers still hastened to and from the battlefield, and a line of stretcher bearers was already trudging grimly to the rear. Emma asked everyone she passed where to find General Kearny, and was soon directed to his position.
Bullets sang around her ears again. Already she was becoming accustomed to them, and flinched only when one came particularly close. She saw General Kearny surrounded by a clot of officers, and rode up to them.
From here the full battle was visible, and Emma caught her breath in awe at the terrible scene. Cannon belched fire from redoubts in the Rebel earthwork, and she could see the force of their brutal discharge mowing swaths in the Federal ranks. Men struggled forward over fallen trees, across muddy fields, and through tangled undergrowth. Some suddenly ceased in their efforts and instead sank slowly to the earth, or dropped swiftly senseless, felled by enemy bullets.
Tearing her gaze from the battle, Emma dismounted and made her way to where General Kearny stood with his staff, observing the battle. She presented him with Colonel Poe’s note, and on his order stayed to carry his reply. While she waited, her gaze drifted back to the battlefield.
“First engagement?” asked a voice nearby.
Emma turned her head and saw a wry fellow with sandy hair and lazy eyes in a lieutenant’s uniform watching her. A member of someone’s staff, no telling whose. There were several commanders gathered here.
She mutely nodded. It was not the Second’s first engagement; technica
lly that had been at Blackburn’s Ford, at Bull Run, but there they had just been pinned by enemy fire. It had not been like this. Nothing like this.
She had seen the results of battle, in the hospitals where she had labored. She had not previously seen how the dreadful wounds occurred. She had known, but knowing at a distance was not the same.
“Take that back to your Colonel, Private.”
Emma accepted a folded piece of paper from General Kearny’s adjutant. The General himself had already moved away, talking with another general and gesturing toward the field.
“To Colonel Poe,” she repeated, confirming that she had not been confused with another.
“Yes,” said the adjutant. “Make haste.”
She led her horse away from the command post and mounted, riding back to her regiment as swiftly as she could. They had advanced somewhat from where she had left them, and she moved farther forward in the woods before looping Samuel’s reins around a tree branch. She gave him a pat and a few words of reassurance, then unlashed her musket from the saddle and started across the field once more.
A minie ball passed so close to her cheek she could feel the breeze of it, and paused, gasping, before moving on. She broke into a trot, thinking she would notice the bullets less that way, and perhaps be a less promising target.
Colonel Poe welcomed her with a harried glance and snatched the message from her hand before she had finished her salute. He scanned the page, then glanced up at her.
“Well done. Lend a hand to Filbert with that stretcher, now. Sergeant Monroe’s been wounded.”
Emma followed his gesture to where the sergeant sat, blood streaming down his face from a wound on his brow, and one arm cradled limply in his lap. Private Filbert, a strapping fellow, was trying to coax him onto a stretcher that lay beside him.
“I’m all right,” Monroe said over and over. “I’m all right.”
“No, you ain’t,” Filbert said gruffly. “You’ve been shot. Twice.”
“My arm wasn’t shot,” he insisted. “I hurt it when I fell. I’m all right.”
Emma knelt by Monroe and wiped the blood from his eyes with her handkerchief. “Let us take you to the surgeon,” she said gently. “He’ll bandage you up, and then you can return to duty.”
She glanced sidelong at Filbert, silently adjuring him to follow her lead. He raised an eyebrow but said nothing.
“I-I can do my duty,” Monroe said fretfully.
“Not with blood all over your face. You’ll terrify the men. Come, let us get you cleaned up first.”
At her gentle urging, he allowed himself to be moved onto the stretcher. Emma and Filbert picked it up and hurried toward the rear, bullets flying around them as thick as ever.
When they got off the battlefield and the hail of bullets decreased to an occasional whine, Emma gave a small sigh of relief. Now she had only to contend with the mud in the road, which went up to their knees.
The rain had lessened somewhat. A field hospital had been set up behind the lines, and Emma and Filbert turned their charge over to one of the nurses there. They returned at once to the front, where Emma spent the better part of the afternoon as a stretcher bearer.
The labor was grueling, especially as the mud worsened with each passing hour, but she would rather carry wounded than create them. She did not fear death, nor to face the hail of bullets at the very front of the battle, but even now she disliked the thought of firing a musket at her fellow man. Her heart resisted that act of destruction, though her opponent be ever so determined an enemy and ready to kill her without a moment’s thought.
Filbert was wounded and himself dismissed to the rear; another took his place. Emma was exhausted, but labored on. On one occasion she and her partner returned to the field and, happening to find herself near her own company, she looked anxiously for the faces of her friends. She saw Lieutenant Turver bending over someone sitting on the ground. Peering harder through the rain, she realized that it was Captain Morse.
With a small cry of dismay she started toward him, stretcher still in hand. Her fellow bearer followed.
The captain sat on the ground, his face pale and set in a grim expression. One leg was stretched before him, and Emma disliked the way it lay—the boot was still on it, but seemed slightly askew.
“Sir!” She knelt beside him and reached toward his leg, but he shook his head.
“It is broken,” he said. “Shattered, I think,” he added, smiling grimly.
“Oh, Captain! I am so sorry!”
Morse looked up at the lieutenant. “Go on, Turver. You are in command. Thompson will look after me.”
Turver shot Emma a glance, then hastened away, calling out an order. Emma touched the captain’s arm.
“Let us take you to the surgeon,” she said.
“Just carry me out of range of the guns, then go back and look after the boys. McCreery and Lyman have fallen, and perhaps they are worse off than I am.”
Emma’s heart filled with admiration for his courage and his thoughtfulness toward his men. She and her partner tenderly laid him on the stretcher and carried him to the rear, then returned to the field at his insistence.
McCreery had indeed been wounded. Emma took him to the hospital and returned to hunt for Lyman, but did not find him.
The afternoon was lengthening, and Emma saw to her dismay that the Federals were now losing ground, being pressed back by the vicious persistence of the Rebels who had the advantage of better cover. Reinforcements had been looked for all afternoon, but as the shadows lengthened hope had faded.
The ground between the two forces was covered with dead and dying men and horses. The smell of death was everywhere. Emma had never seen anything so hellish, and if it were not for the work that kept her constantly moving, she would have wept.
Suddenly a shout went up from the Federal line behind her. Emma turned, and her heart lifted up in hope as the whole army took up the cry.
“Kearney!”
Fresh troops streamed forward onto the field. Leading them was General Kearney on horseback, his color-bearer beside him, the flags whipping in the wind-blown rain. The weary Federals continued to cheer as their comrades pressed the Confederates back into their works. Charge after charge was made against the Rebels, and their batteries were taken from them one by one, until Fort Magruder was silenced at last. The Confederates fled the field, sped on by Yankee bullets.
Night came swiftly, and with it the rain fell the harder, as if the cold sheets could douse the blood from the ravaged field. Emma snatched a moment to attend to Samuel’s needs, finding him a patch of grass near a little rill. She labored on, buoyed up by the excitement of victory, though soon the tragedy of losses overwhelmed that happiness.
A truce was called to allow both armies to withdraw their wounded. Rebel and Yankee surgeons worked side by side, regardless of their allegiance or that of their patients.
Hundreds of casualties lay on the field. The agonized cries of the wounded rose up in the night, piteous, heartbreaking. Emma and others brought torches to the sodden field and continued their grim work, searching through the mud and felled timber and tangled undergrowth, following the desperate cries of the wounded.
All night long Emma and her partner trudged back and forth between the hospital and the battleground with their stretcher. The yellow flames of the torches fluttered over the field, restless and searching, dipping now and again to illuminate the face of one fallen, endlessly following the voices calling for help.
Once Emma and another searcher came to a wounded man at the same time, and she looked up to see Jerome’s face regarding her, pale in the flickering torchlight. Emma stepped back as Jerome knelt beside the sufferer. She watched him tenderly take the man’s hand, then turned to seek someone else who needed help.
As the night wore on the cries of the wounded grew weaker. Many had already been carried from the field. Others, the “goners” who were beyond help—with wounds to the head or the belly—were left to
die where they were, even though they might be lucid. Emma’s heart ached for them; one of her hardest duties was to pass them by.
She worried that there were still others who might be saved but who had given up hope, or lost the strength to call out. She searched on, though her arms ached as if they would fall from their sockets.
Toward dawn the rain stopped. Emma was grateful, though little more comfortable, as she was already wet through. She and her partner trudged over the field in silence, passing the dead and the dying in search of the living.
She saw a man moving feebly and hastened to him. He was large, and lay on his side, half-drenched in blood from a wound through his thigh. Emma and her partner laid the stretcher beside him and made ready to move him onto it. As she rolled him onto his back she saw his face and gasped.
“Damon!”
Damon was too weak to hear her. His face was terribly pale and she knew a stab of dread. He had lost so much blood, and had lain in the cold rain all night—
She refused to allow herself to think in that way. Glancing up at her partner, she lifted Damon’s shoulders and together they shifted him onto the stretcher. They carried him to the hospital, where Emma saw to it he received immediate attention. The surgeons were all busy with the grim work of amputations, but Emma found a nurse she had known at Mansion House and helped him clean and bind up Damon’s wound, then begged him to look after Damon carefully.
There was little more to be done for Damon besides keeping him warm and giving him as much water as he could drink. He roused a little as Emma tucked a blanket around him, and gazed up at her.
“Frank?”
“Yes.” She smiled down at him, struggling for the cheer she had always maintained in the hospitals.
“Is it over?”
“Yes. A victory. The Rebels have fled.”
“Oh.” Damon closed his eyes and smiled. “Good.”
She would have lain beside him, lending him the warmth of her body, but there were wounded still on the field. Instead she squeezed his hand and left him to return to her labors.